Video streaming services are becoming increasingly popular. Many different video on demand (VOD) services now allow viewers to obtain television programs, movies, sports and other types of video content directly over the Internet or a similar network. Most VOD services therefore maintain large libraries of video content to ensure an interesting variation of programming for their customers.
As the number of available media programs increases, however, additional costs are typically incurred for processing and storing the additional content. Generally speaking, each available program is encoded, packaged, checked for quality, and stored before it is made available to viewers. Each of these steps can require expensive computing and storage resources. Moreover, most modern VOD systems make use of content delivery networks (CDNs) to store multiple copies of media contents for convenient delivery to viewers in widely-varying geographic locations. CDN services can be expensive, particularly when nation-wide or even world-wide delivery is expected. Still further, most modern adaptive streaming techniques require that each video be encoded multiple times to create multiple copies of varying quality.
Each video offered by a conventional VOD service, then, typically requires a relatively large expenditure to encode, package, check and deliver the video content. One result of these expenditures is that most VOD services prefer to deliver only the most popular programs that are more likely to quickly recoup the service's up-front costs and to return a greater profit. A large amount of less popular program content (e.g., foreign language content, art films, independent films, content with niche audiences, etc.) therefore remains unavailable online because VOD services simply do not believe that the demand for the video would be sufficient to recoup the expense of making the video available for viewing.
It is therefore desirable to create systems and methods for efficiently and effectively delivering less popular types of video content over the Internet or another network. These and other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background section.